JFK's death 'feels like it was yesterday'

Sunday

Nov 17, 2013 at 6:00 AMNov 17, 2013 at 4:53 PM

By Thomas Caywood, TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Norman Boilard of Worcester, a young airman based in Fort Worth, Texas, stood in a doorway watching as the tanned, youthful president from his home state crossed the tarmac to Air Force One for a short hop to Dallas.

The skies had just begun to clear after a gray morning.

Less than two hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down President John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.

Three days after the assassination, having driven through the night from Holden in a convertible Volkswagen Beetle packed with five people, Robert Jette stood silently on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk watching as the murdered president's body passed by in a flag-draped casket drawn by a team of white horses.

Mr. Boilard and Mr. Jette, who don't know each other, were both 23 years old in those tumultuous days in late November 1963. Mr. Jette had started a family, and Mr. Boilard had his first baby on the way.

Fifty years later, both men still live in Worcester. They've raised children, completed careers and passed into and through middle age.

But the intervening five decades have done little to fade vibrant memories from their brief brushes with President Kennedy on either side of his assassination 50 years ago on Friday.

This is what they remember, as told to the Telegram & Gazette in separate interviews this past week.

Thursday, Nov. 21, 1963

Airman 1st Class Norman Boilard, a weather observer at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, was at home with his wife, Carole, when he heard on the news that the president's plane was inbound.

Mrs. Boilard, pregnant with the couple's first child, wasn't feeling well that night, so the young airman grabbed his Bell & Howell 8 mm movie camera and headed for the base by himself.

The Kennedys were scheduled to spend the night in a Fort Worth hotel before flying on to Love Field in Dallas the next morning.

Mr. Boilard drove the few miles to the base and filmed some grainy, jumpy footage of President Kennedy and his glamorous wife, Jacqueline, as local dignitaries greeted the president and first lady.

Friday, Nov. 22, 1963

The next morning, while he was on duty in the airfield weather station, Mr. Boilard stood in the rear doorway of the base operations center and watched as the Kennedys passed nearby on a rope line.

"They were close, just a few yards away. I could see Jack and Jackie shaking hands with people," Mr. Boilard recalled. "Then I saw them get on the plane and leave."

Looking back, Mr. Boilard said, he recalls feeling uneasy somehow as Air Force One taxied and took off shortly after 11 o'clock that morning.

Local newspapers had been full of stories the previous month when United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson got a hostile reception in Dallas, where an angry mob heckled and jostled him after a speech.

Mr. Boilard, who was born and raised in Worcester, wondered briefly if his fellow Bay State native was in for a similarly rough reception in Dallas. The young airman went back to work collecting weather data from a teletype machine. He had the radio tuned to a special report on the president's trip.

About 12:30 p.m., the crackling voice of a radio newsman announced the president had been shot.

Mr. Boilard was alone in the weather station's back room, where the radio was kept.

"I took off out of the backroom to where the forecaster was briefing two B-52 crews. I said, 'The president's been shot!' All of them, everybody, the forecaster, the two crews, came running into the backroom to listen to the radio," Mr. Boilard recalled.

More than a dozen men, most of them decked out in flight suits, stood utterly still and silent around the radio as the words sank in.

About an hour and a half had passed since Mr. Kennedy, vigorous and very much alive, strode by a few yards from where the men now huddled in abject bewilderment.

Around that time back in Massachusetts, Robert Jette was delivering aspirin, shampoo and other health and beauty products to a convenience store on his route in Medfield.

He can't recall if he heard the news directly from a radio bulletin, or if a customer who had heard on a car radio walked in with word that President Kennedy had been shot.

But from that moment on, Mr. Jette followed the news coverage almost obsessively.

Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963

So it was that Mr. Jette was eating a chicken dinner on a tray in front of the television at home in Holden when nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Mr. Oswald during a live broadcast of the assassin's transfer from the Dallas police station to the county jail.

He was watching with his wife at the time, Ellen, and some friends from out of town. Mr. Jette's friend, Don, had just remarked that he wasn't a fan of the Kennedy family's politics when they saw the commotion on screen.

The president's killer had been shot. They wondered where it all ended.

The state funeral procession for President Kennedy was scheduled to begin the following morning, some 400 miles away in Washington, D.C.

The two couples and a neighborhood teenager who sometimes watched the Jettes' children piled in '63 Volkswagen Beetle around midnight and headed south.

Monday, Nov. 25, 1963

They drove through the night, not stopping to eat or rest. Shortly after dawn, they found what looked to be a convenient parking spot near the Capitol, Mr. Jette said.

As it turned out, the Volkswagen and every car on the block was later towed away.

Looking back across a hazy gulf of five decades, Mr. Jette recently cross-referenced his memories of that morning with maps of the district's streets and the funeral procession route.

Based on all that, Mr. Jette said he's confident the group ended up standing on 15th Street, across from the U.S. Treasury building.

"You can't imagine the tension in the air," he recalled. "You could look up and see the police and armed men walking the rooftops with weapons."

Officials estimated at the time that about 300,000 people lined the route from the White House to the Capitol, where the president's body would be taken to lie in state.

What happened after the group found their viewing spot remains the most indelible memory of the day, Mr. Jette said.

As the group from Holden, now famished and exhausted from the long drive, waited amid the gathering crowd for the procession to begin, an African-American woman on the sidewalk opened a Bible atop a mailbox.

The crowd in the area let out a collective gasp. Mr. Jette said he turned to see that the man who had hurled the slur was wearing the uniform of a high-ranking Army officer, perhaps a major or a lieutenant colonel.

Mr. Jette said the woman calmly addressed the officer, saying she prayed for people like him. When Mr. Jette turned around again, the officer had left.

"He must have felt like a worm," Mr. Jette said.

When the funeral procession finally approached, the crowd fell silent. The only sounds were the clopping of hooves and a military drum corps beating out the slow, solemn funeral march, he said.

The heads of state passed by first. Then Mrs. Kennedy. Then the casket, followed by a riderless black horse.

When the procession had passed, the crowd remained solemn and speechless as it dispersed, Mr. Jette recalled.

"Footsteps and crying. That's all you heard. Nobody was saying anything," he said.

The years since

Things soon went back to normal. Days passed. Then weeks. Life went on.

Mr. Jette would start nursing school in Massachusetts, then spend a few years tending bar, including at a ritzy hotel in Dallas, before going back to finish his degree.

After his hitch in the Air Force, Mr. Boilard returned to Worcester and went to work for and eventually retired from Norton Co., as his father and grandfather had before him.

Years ago, Mr. Boilard sent the 8 mm film he shot of President Kennedy at Carswell Air Force Base to his wife's brother in Arizona, who had the home movies digitized and transferred to a DVD.

He's not sure what became of the original film.

"Either he's got it still, or I've got it somewhere in my stash," Mr. Boilard said. "The CD's around here some place. I haven't looked at it in years."

With the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaching, cable networks for weeks have been running specials on the final days of President Kennedy's life, bringing the memories rushing back for Mr. Boilard and Mr. Jette and many others who were alive at the time.

"Every time I sit and watch something about it, I go, 'Oh, my God, it's been 50 years,' " Mr. Boilard said, "But it feels like it was yesterday."